(This record review originally appeared in Cleveland’s Scene magazine.)
While traveling South India in the mid-’70s, anthropology prof Robert Garfias crossed paths with the seven-member Nathamuni Brothers. But forget the whole Ravi Shankar-with-sitar stereotype. That’s primarily North Indian music, which drones far more than the busy, almost manic brass bands popular at the southern end of the country. The Nathamuni Brothers employ Western instruments (saxophone, clarinet, trumpet) and traditional percussion to create a form of world-jazz fusion that nicks tricks from Middle Eastern grooves, Indonesian folk music, and English military bands. The group’s high-pitched melodies, winding runs, and nervy drum whacks have much in common with Don Cherry and Albert Ayler’s free-jazz explorations of the ’60s, which looked to global folk sounds for inspiration.
There are moments on the new White Magic EP, Dark Stars, that recall ’60s singer-songwriter Judy Collins. The connection makes zero sense, since Collins is a celestial body with a voice carved from crystal. White Magic’s singer, Mira Billotte, is small and grim, with a moan that’s as black as 3 a.m. on a moonless mountaintop. Billotte sees herself as more like the young suburban wanderer that she portrayed in the 2004 indie film Chain. “She was a more extreme version of me: struggling, semi-homeless, working really terrible jobs,” admits the part-time actress.
Let’s get something straight: The Winchester is not a graveyard for cock-rocking dinosaurs and FM-radio relics. Yet some local music fans think this is true, simply because most artists who play the Lakewood club are old and ragged enough to collect Social Security. But Jim Mileti’s rock and roll IQ is too damn high to let former Tesla axemen and Helix dropouts clog up the Winchester’s concert calendar. Over the past five years, the indefatigable owner, booker, and promoter has organized some seriously sublime shows — including British folk-rock pioneers Fairport Convention, stoner honky-tonk icon Commander Cody, and Nashville outlaw-babe Stacie Collins, who was featured in a recent issue of No Depression — so there.
Two autumn releases offer glimpses into the folkie-infested Boulder of the ’60s and early ’70s: Karen Dalton’s Cotton Eyed Joe, a collection of live material recorded at the legendary Attic, and a deluxe reissue of Propinquity’s sole LP from 1972. Emerging from Sing-In Boulder, an annual “high school folk music concert,” Propinquity consisted of five young natives who — for a short while, at least — became a regional success, crafting a creamy fusion of vulnerable folk rock that nowadays would sound right at home on a freak-folk mix. Boasting three quality singer-songwriters (Pat Hubbard, Carla Sciaky and Jason Potter), the group took its name from a tune by Michael Nesmith (the dude with the cap in the Monkees). This makes total sense. Although Propinquity wrote its fair share of where-is-my-place-in-this-world laments and covered the always-grim Townes Van Zandt, the band excels at breezy pop. On “Tappan Square” and “People Come,” Propinquity even bounces along like a Christianized version of Crosby, Still, Nash and Young. But this isn’t religious material — even though Hubbard did look like an extra from Jesus Christ Superstar.
For the sake of argument, let’s just say you’re at the one saloon in town where indie rockers sport fur vests and Native American beadwork. From across the room, you spot Joanna Newsom or Josephine Foster or one of these other delicious, young freak-folk babes. Feeling well-oiled and ready for a little chitchat, you mosey on over to Chanteuse X and ask her a question that’s been gnawing at your noggin like termites in a bag of pine-bark mulch: Excuse me, but I find your music to be enormously inspirational, and I would really love to find out which female singers have inspired you.
Music fans have been stuffed with enough Bob Dylan product to keep ‘em fat through the next century. The music industry will pump out anything it can on the guy, no matter how repetitive or gratuitous. Dylan’s longtime label, Columbia, just dropped yet another anthology of previously released material: the triple-disc set Dylan. And in October, Sony released the Other Side of the Mirror: Live at the Newport Folk Festival DVD. It’s far more interesting than Dylan, but still, a lot of this footage already appears in numerous formats.
Neil Michael Hagerty hasn’t released a great album in five years. That’s peculiar, because the dude — first as a member of Royal Trux, then as a solo artist — released no fewer than 10 great albums between 1990 and 2003. But sometime in 2004, not long after the release of Neil Michael Hagerty & the Howling Hex, he started slumping. After the Trux fell apart at the top of the decade, Hagerty channeled his newfound freedom into three excellent solo records. As time wore on, however, his limitations emerged.
When consumed as background music, No Doctors’ Origin & Tectonics passes for neo-grunge blues rock. Guitarist Elvis DeMorrow grooves like a Midwest punk harboring a secret love for ZZ Top and Free, Mr. Brians pummels his drum kit with boogie belligerence, and Chauncey Chaumpers’ baritone wail contains genetic chunks of the Lizard King, Glenn Danzig, and Ian Astbury in its double helix. Move beyond casual listening, however, and the band’s fifth album reveals a refined weirdness. This has been the Bay Area quartet’s modus operandi since coming together as teenagers in Minnesota nearly a decade ago. Like Royal Trux, their chief inspiration, No Doctors can pass for straightforward rockers avant-freaks. “AAO,” for example, would be garden-variety doom if not for the group’s spiky minimalist interplay, sax-man Cansafis Foote’s low-end skronk, and the jagged changes. “Yardin,” a back-porch jam made muscular with proggy classicism, follows a similarly twisted path. But none of these eccentricities ever gets in your face. This is true even when the band cranks a hypnotic, stripped-down howler like “Tuning th’ Sundial,” which really isn’t that far removed from the Screaming Trees or Soundgarden, except it’s just kind of… off.
Since her death in 1993, Karen Dalton’s fan base has grown faster than a Colorado mountain town. And fans can thank a retired builder from Indiana named Joe Loop for a new batch of previously unheard recordings, Cotton Eyed Joe — a collection of songs Dalton made in the early ’60s.
Gram Parsons and his band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, are are among rock and roll’s great cult legends — a short-lived group of dope-smoking Californians who laid the foundation for country rock, alt-country, and even those damn Eagles. Yet most folks, including the Burritos themselves, remember them as a lousy live act: under-rehearsed and way, way too stoned. But Parsons fanatics had no way of confirming this. Since the late ’60s, their only exposure to the group’s cosmic vibrations came via its first two albums.
